Today many types of transactions are performed over the internet and telephone networks. Because of this, many companies have heavily invested in both electronic systems and applications. These companies typically employ monitoring services to detect abnormal volume or activity with regards to the systems and applications. By monitoring the volume and activity levels on the systems, the companies are more easily able to detect errors and abnormal changes in volume.
However, monitoring services today rely on historical data in order to detect abnormal volume changes. Unfortunately, the historical data must be collected for several years before the monitoring services are able to effectively detect abnormal volume changes. Additionally, typical monitoring services are unable to detect abnormal volume changes in real time when the information may be most useful as the calculations typically involved using historical data are computationally intensive.